Ashlee Marie Preston

"We don’t need an invitation to access our greatness."

"You’re a fucking fraud. It’s really fucked up that you continue to support somebody... that does everything with the military, that’s erasing our fucking community. And you support it."

"There’s already an attitude among perpetrators that you can’t rape or harass the willing. Society views trans women as sexual deviants, and many believe that we "ask for it" or "bring it on ourselves". As trans women we’re expected to function as sexual objects and an aide in satisfying the cis-hetero male libido. We’re demonized and criminalized as perverts out to trick and deceive cis hetero men; therefore anything that happens to us, we ‘had coming."

"What tends to happen in the LGBTQ community is that everything pertaining to the G part supersedes everything else. I decided to have a cake made with 77 photos of trans women under 35 who have lost their lives to transphobic hate because wedding cakes get more attention than black trans women in our community."

"It is the “battle of the beliefs”: hanging on to your belief that you are who you are despite how others may define you, while also challenging yourself not to compare your insides to other people’s outsides. It’s a constant effort to align yourself externally with how you feel internally."

"I often made up these stories in my mind about people I idolized or wanted to be like. I always write happy endings for them and convinced myself that life would be so much easier if I could walk in their shoes. But I never realized that in those shoes their feet were scraped and bruised like mine."